Showing papers by "Bryan S. Turner published in 2020"

Successful societies: Decision-making and the quality of attentiveness.

Abstract: Combining moral philosophy with sociological theory to build on themes introduced in Hall and Lamont's Successful Societies (2009), the paper outlines a distinctive perspective. It holds that a necessary condition of successful societies is that decision-makers base their decisions on a high level of attentiveness (concern and comprehension) towards subjectively valued and morally legitimate forms of life. Late modern societies consist of a plurality of forms of life, each providing grounds for what Alasdair MacIntyre has called internal goods-valued and morally valuable practices. The status of such goods is examined, and distinctions are drawn between their manifest and latent, and transposable and situationally specific, characteristics. We integrate this refined idea of internal goods into a developed conception of habitus that is both morally informed and situationally embedded. The sociological approach of strong structuration theory (SST) is employed to demonstrate how this conception of habitus can guide the critique of decision-making that damages internal goods. We identify the most pervasive and invidious forms of damaging decision-making in contemporary societies as those involving excessive forms of instrumental reasoning. We argue that our developed conception of habitus, anchored in the collectively valued practices of specific worlds, can be a powerful focus for resistance. Accounts of scholarship in higher education and of the white working class in America illustrate the specificities of singular, particular, social worlds and illuminate critical challenges raised by the perspective we advocate.

Religion, State and Civil Society: Nation-Building in Australia

Abstract: Classical sociology of religion was based upon the assumption that religion would disappear with the development of an urban industrial capitalist culture. This assumption about the inevitable demise of Christianity was an essential assumption of early Marxism which treated religion as an epiphenomenal problem, where religion functioned as a mystification of real class interests. In the German tradition which followed from Nietzsche there was also a commitment to the assumption that God is dead and that the modern world is characterized by a chaos of values which renders absolute commitment problematic. This Nietzsche tradition found its primary expression in Max Weber’s speeches on science and politics as vocations (Turner 1983). This perspective on secularity was also prominent in Georg Simmel’s views on the tragedy of culture. In the psychoanalytic tradition of Freud, the presence of Nietzsche’s argument is quite clear although disguised in the Freudian orthodoxy, since Freud argues that modern culture is characterized by the collapse of a systematic moral tradition uniting the superego with cultural constraints. In the modern Freudian legacy this problem was expressed primarily by Philip Rieff in The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966). It was primarily within the Durkheim tradition in sociology that a crucial ambiguity was expressed with respect to the functions of religion in a postreligious era since it was Durkheim who argued that any viable social system had to be grounded in a set of powerful beliefs, symbols and practices.

The Expectation of Love in Older Age: Towards a Sociology of Intimacy

Abstract: Ageing as a process does not necessarily bring about a decline of sexual desire, interest or capacity, and there are many other ways of being intimate with a partner. This chapter presents the results from interviews with thirty-seven older women, and explores the many and varied ways in which intimate relationships are sustained in older age. In recent years, much has been written about the considerable changes in the expectations of both men and women in intimate relationships, changes that are reflected in altered attitudes towards marriage, adultery and divorce. In contemporary society, the complementarity of gender roles in what might be called a traditional marriage has been transformed into a ‘pure relationship’ in which individuals are forced to negotiate rights and responsibilities. This emphasis on intimacy places new expectations and tensions on marriage, as one respondent put it when speaking of her first marriage: Women were talking about divorce changing their life.

Max Weber and the Late Modernization of Catholicism

Abstract: While Max Weber wrote extensively on a range of religions—Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, and most extensively Protestantism—there is no fully developed sociology of Catholicism. This chapter attempts to construct Max Weber’s missing sociology of Catholicism from the various scattered comments across his works. While Weber saw Protestantism influencing the growth of capitalism (and more broadly modernization), his view of Catholicism was largely negative: it was ritualistic, magical, bureaucratic, and traditional. What would Weber have made of Catholicism in the twentieth century and twenty-first century? This chapter first examines developments in nineteenth-century Catholicism that lay behind Weber’s critical commentary. The second half asks how changes in Catholicism after the Second Vatican Council (informally known as Vatican II, 1962–1965) have brought about a modernization of Catholicism. The chapter argues for the relevance of Weber’s views today by considering the impact of Vatican II on Catholic teaching and practice, arguing that it represents the political modernization of Catholicism. Vatican II represented a radical departure from the political conservatism of the nineteenth century. In principle, the church was no longer critical of secular democracy, pluralism, the party system, and state sovereignty. This modernization, however, began to undermine the universalism of the church and pushed Catholicism toward denominationalism. However, the church did not modernize its teaching on contraception, abortion, marriage, divorce, and family life. This tension between political modernization and what we might simply call “familial conservatism” still haunts the church today.